If you plan on traveling via plane with your favorite electronics, make sure they're with you at all times -- or a greedy TSA officer might grab it at the airport.

A recent ABC News investigation busted an Orlando, Florida TSA officer for stealing an iPad that was left behind at a security checkpoint. The TSA officer, Andy Ramirez, was caught on tape handling the iPad at the checkpoint, and through electronic tracking, the same iPad found its way to the TSA officer's home.

ABC News targeted 10 airports around the U.S. that were known for TSA theft during its investigation. At each airport, iPads were purposely left behind at security checkpoints to see whether TSA officers would report the devices to lost and found, or keep them.

At nine of the ten security checkpoints, TSA officers were honest enough to contact the owners of the iPads, who had their name and phone number right on the iPad's case. However, Ramirez at the Orlando airport was the one exception.

After handling the iPad, electronic tracking traced the iPads movement about 30 miles away from the Orlando airport -- right to Ramirez's home. After 15 days and no word on the missing iPad, ABC News went to Ramirez's home and confronted him.

At first, Ramirez denied that he had the missing device. ABC News mentioned that they tracked the device to his home, but only after ABC activated the alarm on the iPad using iCloud did Ramirez finally hand it over.

But instead of admitting that he stole the iPad, he pinned the blame on his wife, saying that she brought it home from the airport and didn't tell him about it.

Ramirez isn't the only TSA officer snatching personal belongings from passengers. According to the TSA, about 381 officers have been fired from 2003-2012 for theft, where 11 have been fired this year alone. Ramirez is now on that list.

"This is the tip of the iceberg," said Rep. John Mica (R-Florida). "It is an outrage to the public, and actually to our aviation system."

So sitting there being unable to watch something on a "media consumption" device is acceptable, just take comfort in the thought that it's the website that should be "updated" for the device. Not the other way around. Is that your silver lining?

quote: Flash is not a feature it's a bug.

Totally valid argument! I mean honestly, how could anyone argue with this?

As long any web sites have Flash it's not dead. Any modern device should be enabled so we can view those features until at a time it is officially declared no longer necessary. Apple instead just said they won't use it and screw any web sites that do use it. It's just another example of Apple trying to get their own way.

And by the way, in the spirit of this week's South Park, yeah sure Apple products are soooo much better than every other product out there.

I would love if it my operating system still supported DOS. It doesn't, so I use DOSBox. A good rule of thumb is that you shouldn't drop support for a once-popular technology until there is third-party software that can support it for your customers who still need it.

AFAIK, any modern computer still supports DOS.. You can still install and run it, though networking and optical drive support would be a bit iffy if you're not a pro at editting your config.sys and autoexec.bat files.

Operating systems don't 'support' DOS -- it's an operating system itself, with a pure cli shell. If all you want is DOS cli, the command prompt still does most of what it's supposed to; and otherwise there are a plethora of DOS emulators.

As for customers who still 'need' it.. Enough already! I'm tired of dealing with governmental entities whose antiquated systems are running the same insecure database software they had developed nearly 3 decades ago, which at best simply have a gui 'port' to make them seem slightly modern. Here in Ohio, the majority of municipalities (along with the entireity of the state gov't) use the OPERS 'suite' of billing/payroll/recordkeeping software; which relies on the MS Fox database engine from back in the 80s, storing unencrypted data into easily readable db files. Sounds like a great way to stores hundreds of thousands of workers' personal/financial info on, huh..?

Operating systems absolutely do support DOS. OS/2 ran DOS software. Windows 95, 98 and Me could run DOS software from the DOS prompt, or boot into DOS mode if you needed full compatibility (WinMe didn't support real mode DOS from the DOS prompt). Windows XP "supported" DOS in every sense of the word, since it was an NT operating system and did not run on top of DOS. Windows XP ran DOS software in a VDM (Virtual DOS Machine). To this day, eComStation continues to run DOS software.

When one operating system can run the software of another operating system without third-party software, I call that "support".

Flash is actually pretty good at what it was designed for - low-bandwidth animation. It's whole rationale for being was to minimize network traffic (very important back when people used 56k modems). CPU use on the local machine is higher, but that was an acceptable tradeoff at the time.

Feature-wise, it's still immensely popular in the artists and animation community. HTML5 can replace some, but not all of the features. And the tools for creating Flash animations far surpass HTML5.

Where Flash sucked was when people started using it as a generic programming platform, like Java. Write an app once for Flash, have the same binary run on any platform. This was the real reason Apple didn't support it. Apple has a very clear policy for iOS: no running 3rd party binaries - everything must go through the App Store. They've loosened up a bit on this (they used to ban even a BASIC compiler, now they allow it as long as you have to enter the programs yourself by hand).

It's a sad day when a valid argument is down rated because people simply dislike the person making the argument. It is a fact that Adobe no longer supports the mobile version of flash they initially introduced for phones and tablets, and that includes the version for Android. Adobe will not support flash on Android 4.1 either, in fact their official stance is if you upgrade to Jellybean you should UNINSTALL flash player. Yes it may still work, but when the developer of the software takes such a stance, I think it REALLY is time to stop with the "flash is important" mantra. Apple doesn't need to support it when Android doesn't support it, and when Adobe doesn't support it. South Park Studio's website will be updated to the modern standard eventually, but like many websites that operate under the umbrella of a corporate overlord the administrators who are probably desperate to overhaul things don't have a say in the matter.

Besides, it's not as though you can't actually support Comedy Central and buy a season pass for South Park through iTunes anyway. If you buy a $500 tablet then you can probably afford to buy the media you consume on it as well. The South Park creators offer their shows for free on their site as a service to fans, but they would still like people to buy their shows, merchandise, and movies as well. I for one have loved canceling my cable in favor of Netflix, Amazon Prime, and buying/renting my favorite shows and movies to enjoy commercial free. It is a better experience for me, I get only what I want, and I support only the content creators that I want.

Except Steve Jobs made that decision years ago when Flash was the ONLY viable alternative. At that point in time the majority of all web content was in Flash (YouTube etc etc), and iOS users couldn't access it. It was an incredibly arrogant decision that detracted from his customers experiences, NOT enhance them.

quote: Besides, it's not as though you can't actually support Comedy Central and buy a season pass for South Park through iTunes anyway.

lol wow. That's just brilliant....sigh. No wonder you support Tony, you're as hopelessly locked-in to the Apple machine as he is.

Dude get a clue, I'm with some friends and I just want to load up a website and watch something. Freaking iTunes? You're off the deep end!

Steve Jobs had the authority to make that decision, perhaps if the leaders of other companies could be so bold the other tech giants might be able to compete with the likes of Apple and Google today. But instead, the ones who do offer products are second rate at best. As it turned out, Steve Jobs was right because Adobe killed mobile flash, and today offer conversion tools even for the desktop version. Apple made the right move, get over it.

And as much as you may believe I am "locked in to the Apple Machine" my physical bluray collection (which is ripped to my server) vastly outweighs my digital purchased library which consists mostly of music. Not all of which is from iTunes either, I make purchases from Amazon as well. I prefer to enjoy my favorite movies and tv shows commercial free, which is why anything older is either ripped from a physical disk I own, or viewed through Netflix or Amazon Prime. Any new show I cannot watch online, yes I will simply buy through iTunes/Amazon or the creators website (if available). I favor iTunes when I am on my iPad because making purchases there is a lot easier, however if Amazon is able to improve their Instant Video app things may change.

But if that is "locked in to the Apple Machine" then I guess you and I have a vastly different understanding of what it means to be "locked in" to something. Mine would be text book and yours seems to be based in the magical kingdom from which you reign...

There is nothing wrong with supporting content creators through buying their content directly instead of simply viewing it on TV. I can't stand viewing shows on cable any more because I grew sick of the ads interrupting the content every few minutes. I am different than you, this may come as a shock but not everyone is the same.

HTML 5 would be fine, IFF they could decide on a video standard. Apple (and MS) keeps insisting that the video standard should be h.264. Surprise, Apple has patents that cover h.264 (and MS has a x-license agreement...). Mozilla and Opera want open-source Theora and / or WebM. (Google bought into VP8 (WebM), and has declared it to be license-free. Mozilla and Opera have since agreed to have VP8 WebM) added to the standard.)

This has brought the HTML 5 standards into a state that might be called 'total disarray' if one were to be so kind. Apple will only support h.264. Period. MS will (and does) support any / all of the above, user intervention might be needed. Opera and Mozilla WILL NOT support h.264. Period. Google Chrome / Chromium will support any / all of the above, user intervention may be required... Several other (smaller user base) browsers, such as Web and Konqueror, will support all of the above.

So, if Apple could (for once) play nice in the sandbox, we might actually see an HTML 5 standard come out of committee sometime prior to the end of the century. Until then, the state of video in the smartphone world looks anything but smart.

h264 video is used virtually everywhere, and is supported in hardware by virtually every device out there. Thanks to being a mature format, it's quality is superb and the tools out there are great.

Comparisons of quality at similar bitrates show WebM to be significantly inferior. There's some tools out there, but not as mature and widespread of support. I've yet to see devices advertise WebM encoding or decoding acceleration in-hardware, so doubt it's as widespread.

Despite the ubiquity of h264 video, I've yet to hear of any major legal problems come up with it.

Google and FOSS zealots need to get go away and come back when they have a competitive product, and stop trying to force their garbage on the rest of us before its ready.

"So, I think the same thing of the music industry. They can't say that they're losing money, you know what I'm saying. They just probably don't have the same surplus that they had." -- Wu-Tang Clan founder RZA